Anna Bayman. Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London.

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The literary and economic cultures of early modern London have been the subject of sustained and productive critical attention in recent years, with a variety of ambitious studies taking up the literature of page and stage amid the backdrop of the sustained and substantial growth of England's capital. Anna Bayman's Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London adds significantly to this narrative of metropolitan writing circa 1600 by examining one of the most prolific and intriguing authors of the early seventeenth century. As her title suggests, Bayman situates Dekker in the print networks of professional pamphleteering, arguing that these ephemeral, ambiguous, and unabashedly for-profit books were especially attuned to shifting urban conditions and written for a heterogeneous audience. According to Bayman, because of his sharp awareness of the ways that material concerns shaped his information, his incessant desire to interrogate authority and authorship itself, and his ambivalence to a diverse readership, Dekker engaged with an increasingly literate and specifically metropolitan audience that emerged in the years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I.